Two years ago, the Obama administration launched a reform of the secondary school system that makes many liberals uneasy. From a French perspective, the tenets of the on-going reform are indeed alarming: a competition between schools to get public funding, the setting up of autonomous « Charter Schools », a continuous assessment of results based on tests, teachers who must give up tenure and can be fired in case of « incompetence », … Applying free market principles to the secondary school system is seen as the only way for schools to be efficient. But more than anything, they are now held « accountable ».

True, American junior high schools and high schools are unable to offer the same education to all students. A poor child has one chance out of ten to make it to university and less chances still if he or she is a minority. One of the key tenets of the reform is to bridge the « achievement gap », an expression used since the 1980’s to label the difference in academic performance between poorer and richer children – a difference that is statistically heavily correlated with race.

Education is one area where the federal state is very prescriptive. As it happens, the present reform is a continuation of the « No Child Left Behind » reform law passed by the Bush administration in 2002. However, financial and administrative management of the secondary school system is the responsibility of state governments, not the federal government. Their current acute budgetary difficulties constitute a major impediment to the reform.

This on-going reorganization of the secondary school system has received much less attention from abroad than the health care or Wall Street regulation reforms. It is however a key undertaking of the Obama presidency.

This content is available in French : Où va l'école américaine ?